


Today is a Gift

by spookyknight



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-20 07:46:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/884764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyknight/pseuds/spookyknight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Well, of course she did. The TARDIS was infinite, after all, she had a room for everything. And here it was, they were standing in it. But the Doctor certainly didn’t remember dreaming up a ‘wrapping paper room.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	Today is a Gift

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gallifreyburning](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/gifts).



> Submission for the TARDIS ficathon. TARDIS Room was the Wrapping Paper Room prompted by gallifreyburning. Enjoy!

The Doctor noticed Rose had suddenly become very interested in the present time. Specifically, dates.

“What’s today?” she asked as he readied the coordinates for their next adventure.

It was the fifth time in recent memory she had asked something like this, not that he had been counting. Okay, yes, he had definitely been counting. But only because he was suddenly anxious about why Rose was counting.

“Time is…”

“…relative in the TARDIS, I know,” she finished for him. “But what’s today on Earth. Like, for me since I was there last?”

“Oh, I’d say it’s July the eighteenth, two thousand and six,” he rattled off distractedly. “Should be a Tuesday, I think.”

Rose nodded to herself, as though she had decided something internally that he couldn’t possibly guess. “Okay.”

Confused, the Doctor let the matter drop in favor of discovering where the TARDIS was taking them next.

***

“Do Time Lords celebrate birthdays?” Rose asked sometime later, as they walked through the marketplace on a planet far, far away from Earth.

“No,” the Doctor answered assuredly. “As general rule, no.”

“Hmm,” she murmured thoughtfully, and it irked him that he couldn’t tell how she felt about that answer. Then, she continued, “Do you even remember when your birthday is?”

“Nope,” he lied easily.

He did of course, his big Time Lord brain remembered everything, but even if he told her the date wouldn’t match up to anything on the calendar that she would recognize.

“But if we counted your regeneration as a birthday for you - for this you,” she surmised with a growing smile. “Then I suppose your birthday would be Christmas.”

He got that look on his face, then. The horribly smug one that told Rose she wasn’t going to like the next words he was about to say. So when he opened his mouth to speak, she beat him to it.

“Don’t you dare,” she warned dangerously, and he shut his mouth again.

***

It happened again, walking back home again after their third visit to New Earth.

“Did Time Lords have holidays?” she asked, out of the blue.

The Doctor stopped in his tracks. Enough was enough, he needed to know what was prompting all these questions.

“Rose, what’s this all about?”

Rose heaved a long-suffering sigh, as though she knew this question was always coming and she had just been waiting for it. “Come with me.”

She took his hand, threading their fingers together the way they were meant to be. That was a good start, the Doctor thought. Rose led him back to the TARDIS at a brisk pace. When they entered, he briefly stopped to send them back into the Vortex. The moment he was finished, she grabbed his hand again, dragging him straight out of the console room and down through the labyrinth of corridors in a direction that was nowhere near her usual hangouts.

They passed the library, the theater, the pool; even the pub and the zen room. Her silence during this long trip was odd. He couldn’t place at all where they were headed. It unnerved him to think there was something going on in his ship that he wasn’t aware of and Rose’s behavior was worrying him.

“Rose, where are you taking me?

She smiled at his impatience, though he couldn’t see it. “Just wait, we’re almost there.”

He was relieved when they finally stopped at an unfamiliar door. With a deep breath, Rose entered the room, stepping aside to let him follow her.

He looked around and was shocked to find a space he didn’t recognize. “What’s this?”

“The wrapping paper room,” she answered automatically.

He made a befuddled face. “The TARDIS has a wrapping paper room?”

Well, of course she did. The TARDIS was infinite, after all, she had a room for everything. And here it was, they were standing in it. But the Doctor certainly didn’t remember dreaming up a ‘wrapping paper room.’ It must have been an accommodation his ship made for his lovely companion.

Mentally, he thanked his old girl for her approval and for taking care of Rose so thoughtfully. Silently, he felt the ship hum smugly back at him, taking full credit for Rose’s happiness and her decision to stay even aftersome stupid Time Lord failed to warn her about the possibility of regeneration. Well, that sorted that, didn’t it? Not only did the TARDIS approve of Rose, but apparently fancied the young woman as hercompanion, not his. Wonderful, now the Doctor had the strange feeling of being jealous of his own ship.

“Yeah,” Rose answered, breaking him out of his telepathic conversation. “I stumbled in here one day a while back.”

“What’s all this stuff?”

“I just… I kept finding little things for you, here and there on different planets and everything. I was saving it all for some day special, to give them to you. But I kept asking you about holidays and stuff and I never found the right time.”

He was rendered momentarily speechless, blown away by her selflessness and caring. And also presents! He loved presents. Especially from-Rose presents. And there were so many, mostly smallish, probably trinkets really, but all different sizes and shapes and colors.

“Today is Christmas,” he blurted out quickly, regaining his wits. “Well, I say today, but not really, ‘cause right now we’re in the Vortex. Only, yes! Yes, somewhere out there Christmas is today. But, relatively to Earth’s calendar based on our last visit, today is in fact the Harvest Festival on the planet Tamarus. And the Supreme Holy Day of Fasting on Akura Seven.”

Rose just watched him, allowing him to ramble on unimpeded as she shook her head, chuckling to herself.

At her teasing look, he paused to clear his throat. “The point is, everyday is a holiday. And all of them are special, Rose. Every single one.”

The smile bloomed slowly on her face until it was a full-fledged grin. “So I guess you want at your presents, then?”

“Well,” he began thoughtfully, reaching a hand up to absently run through his hair. “Since we’re here.”

“Well come on, then. In,” she ordered in a playful voice, motioning for him to enter further into the room. “Take a look at what you’ve got.”

He made to do just that, elated at the possibility of discovering the mystery inside each beautiful box. But as he caught a closer look at the gifts wrapped with such painstaking care, he felt that this was all wrong. Rose had all these wonderful presents prepared for him and he didn’t have one thing to give her in return. And he could hear her voice in his mind saying, ‘you’ve already given me the stars’, but it was still wrong. The Doctor wanted to find joy in the giving, not just receiving. He wanted to see her smile light up with some trinket or another; to show her in some small way even a fraction of the joy she always brought to him.

The TARDIS must have picked up on his distress, because suddenly bluish lights began flashing along the ceiling accompanied by a discordant ringing. It was a cacophony that seemed to be all for show, as the ship herself was only responding his gentle telepathic prodding with the same smug attitude she’d affected a few moments before.

“Oh, cerulean alert, that can’t be good,” he said, feigning disappointment. “Better go have a look.”

Rose gaped at him. “Cerulean, what happened to mauve?”

“Mauve is bad, cerulean is just ‘meh, something’s happening.’” He shrugged. “Best still check it out, though, could be important. Or could be nothing. We’ll never know until we go see.”

He held out his hand to her, wiggling his fingers as was his way. As he’d hoped, she smiled at the gesture and accepted his hand, running all the way back to the console room with him, hand in hand.

***

If Rose had suspected the alert was a ruse, she didn’t let on. The Doctor effortlessly transitioned the distraction with a quick dance of the controls at the console and soon they were out the doors, onto their next adventure.

He had planned a visit to early colonial America, hoping to fill her mind with the excitement of the New World and the age of discovery. Unfortunately, the TARDIS landed them in the winter of 1609 at Jamestown, smack in the middle of the Starving Times. Their sudden appearance had made them the perfect scapegoat for the famine and they had very narrowly escaped death by hanging on suspicion of witchcraft.

The ordeal left Rose exhausted both emotionally and physically, and so she excused herself to sleep immediately upon their return. Once freshly showered, she fell into bed and stayed there for longer than usual. Time was funny on the TARDIS, but once she awoke, she was fairly sure she’d slept for the better part of a day.

The Doctor didn’t find her in the kitchen having breakfast as he usually did once she was awake. After she was fed, Rose found herself bored and a little lonely. She searched out all the places on the TARDIS that made sense to find the Doctor and, unable to locate him, gently prodded the ship mentally for his whereabouts. Rose didn’t often get the TARDIS involved, afraid to take advantage of her welcome, but whenever she did, the ship always responded positively.

Rose followed the vague directions that appeared in her mind through a telepathic influence she couldn’t begin to explain, until she came to a door ajar with a sliver of light pouring into the hallway.

“Doctor?” she queried curiously, pushing the door open slowly.

Rose caught a flurry of color past the door and there was a great scuffling sound as he quickly ordered “Don’t come in!”

She turned her back obediently and stood in the doorway facing the hall. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like? I’m wrapping.”

And suddenly, Rose realized where she’d ended up. While she was sleeping, the Doctor had disappeared into the Wrapping Paper Room.

“How many more to go?” she asked quietly.

He was silent for a moment, concentrating, then answered “Just this one.”

Rose nodded, to herself mostly, and backed into the room a few steps, sitting cross-legged on the floor facing away from him. She waiting patiently, listening to the crinkle of paper and ribbon and biting her lip to stop the soppy grin from spreading across her face.

“Doctor, you didn’t have to get me anything.”

“Sure I did,” he replied easily. “Had to. It was absolutely required.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she continued waiting, sitting still until the sounds of wrapping slowed to a stop.

“All finished?”

“Yup,” he confirmed enthusiastically.

Rose turned around to face him. “So,” she began. “Do you want to open them?”

“Now?” He sounded surprised. “Rose, it’s late. You should get back to sleep.”

“Can’t sleep now,” she quipped playfully, a smile spreading across her lips. “We have all these presents to open.”

Her excitement was infectious, and the Doctor couldn’t help his answering grin for all the universe. “Alright,” he agreed finally. “Come on, let’s see what we’ve got.”

She bounded over to him and plopped down before the presents he’d just wrapped. They quickly discovered there was to be an order to unwrapping, small gifts first leading on to the larger or more meaningful gifts later.

The first few boxes they opened were kitschy type gifts. For the Doctor: a couple banana flavored items, a TARDIS blue mug for tea time, brightly colored sticky notes that would inevitably find their way onto the console, and several ties. For Rose: luxury soap and lotions from a recreational spa planet, a nearly matching mug (because great minds, apparently, thought alike), and decremental roses in nearly every medium - leather, metal, wood, paper, glass, and crystal.

Rose opened a package wrapped in ornate paisley paper to find a beautiful shell encased in ice from Woman Wept.

“It’s the hyperbaric chamber, you see,” the Doctor explained proudly. “Keeps the integrity of the ice.”

“It’s beautiful.” Rose smiled, taking her time to admire the beautiful piece.

Next, the Doctor opened one of his packages, wrapped in loud neon colors. He found inside an incredibly detailed snowglobe, from Las Vegas, the planet not the city.

“That’s got to be the only way the Strip ever got snow,” Rose piped up cheerfully.

“Well, actually…”

“Yeah, I know.” She giggled. “You said the same thing when we visited.”

Rose opened a small rectangular package to find a first edition of A Christmas Carol. “Doctor,” she breathed, aghast but smiling. “I thought this would be an abuse of time travel,” she added cheekily.

“Nah,” he dismissed her comment with a wave of his hand. “Look inside.”

Rose opened the book to find an inscription on the first page: ‘To my dear Rose Tyler - the only real ghosts in this world are the spectres of regret. Live your life in such a way that they never haunt you. With regards to Rose and her Doctor, Charles Dickens.’

“You must have been holding on to this for a long time,” she noted quietly, trying to blink away the tears prickling the edges of her eyes at the memories the gift evoked.

“Yes, well,” he mumbled, tugging absently on his ear. “Just as you said you found things along the way, I may have… stumbled across a few good items for you as well.”

“Thanks,” Rose told him, but the word didn’t really sum up what she was feeling.

The corner of his mouth turned up in smile and he regarded her fondly for a moment, his face softening into something Rose dared not to define. As the mood was bordering on soppy anyway, she reached for a present she was particularly proud of, handing it to him to open.

“What’s this?”

She shook her head, rolling her eyes playfully. “Just open it.”

Sensing the thin package was delicate, the Doctor ripped away the paper gently. He was rewarded behind the decorative paper with a visage of his beloved ship. On canvas behind the simple frame, the TARDIS was captured in exquisite detail with oil paints. As he ran his fingers carefully over the glass, he imagined he could feel the wood beneath his touch.

“Rose,” he began, voice choked with emotion. “Did you…?”

“Oh, no,” she answered, chuckling. “I mean, I’m pretty good at painting but not that good. No, it was that street artist in the market on Atsila. I saw him painting the TARDIS on our way out and came back to buy it from him.”

“You said you were going back for the ice cream,” the Doctor recalled thoughtfully.

“Well,” Rose said, mimicking his treatment of the word. “If you remember, I did come back with ice cream too.”

He laughed, grinning stupidly at the memory of trying to devour the frozen treat while simultaneously attempting to send them back into the Vortex one-handed.

By now, they were knee deep in crumpled, colorful paper, surrounded by a sea of foil, tissue paper, and a few curly cue bows mixed with thick satin ribbons. Rose paused and giggled when she realized how it had piled up around him as the Doctor sat before her gazing at the crystal cube with the shell sitting by her knee. He looked up at her smiling and laughing, and looked back at the presents between them and the thought hit him, suddenly and forcefully.

The items before them were more than just presents, this was a material culture of their travels together. Objects and knick knacks from every corner of the universe, each with their own tale, some humorous and happy, others serious and meaningful. As a Time Lord, the Doctor’s memories would always remain clear but Rose’s recollections of their individual adventures would eventually fade and blur. For her, this was so important, a physical reminder to recall the details of their time together.

“So, is that it?” Rose asked, looking around them and taking quick inventory of the empty boxes and crinkled paper.

“Not quite,” the Doctor replied softly, coming to a decision in his own mind. “One more.”

It was risky, this gift. But the Doctor supposed all gifts were, in that one wrapped up their feelings for a person with a pretty bow and hoped for the best that the present would be well-received, yet always secretly feared the worst, that the present would be disliked and the feelings behind it rejected.

“Oh?” she chirped excitedly, raising her eyebrows in question. “What’s that, then?”

“Close your eyes,” he whispered.

Rose did as she was told, shutting her eyes and sitting quietly in wait. She realized belatedly that her hands were down at her sides and wondered if she should reach out to receive his present. Just when she was about to ask, she felt his lips brush hers and gasped at the soft contact. He pulled away suddenly and for a moment she wondered if it was a mistake or a just cruel trick of her imagination. But then he pressed forward again, finally sealing his lips against hers in a kiss.

She sighed and leaned into the contact, winding her arms around his neck and pulling him closer. The Doctor took her acceptance as invitation to deepen the kiss, opening his mouth to hers and gently entreating entrance with a swipe of his tongue against her bottom lip. Rose answered him greedily, pressing into his body as he wove his fingers through her hair, tilting her head just there to achieve the perfect angle.

Rose allowed herself to be swept away with the sensation of finally snogging the Doctor properly, no enemies or imminent danger in sight. The reality was far better than her (embarrassingly frequent) dreams. Her skin sparked and sizzled everywhere they touched, desire burning deep within her body and mind reeling in a dizzying rush of affection. She always thought, always hoped, she saw her love for him returned in every smile and now she had proof in the way his hands trembled scarcely against her scalp and his tongue deftly explored her mouth.

There was a frantic desperation there, buzzing just beneath the surface, but he restrained it in favor of careful exploration, crafting every touch and caress to enhance her pleasure. The sweetness of his actions overwhelmed her, and her chest constricted with all the love she felt for him. He had taken this chance, a leap of faith the she would return his feelings just as fervently. It was only fair that she return the favor.

Slowly, she broke away, panting as she leaned her forehead against his, loathed to put even an inch between them, but determined to go through with her plan.

“I’ve got one more for you too,” she hummed, voice deep and rough with desire.

“Oh?” he blurted out eloquently, trying to regain his wits.

“Close your eyes,” Rose breathed against his lips, her voice low and sultry.

“Alright,” he agreed, obeying her command.

There was a crunching sound as she stood and waded through the wadded up wrapping paper around them and then more rustling that had him wondering if she was wrapping something right now. He sat still, trying to be patient in waiting but as always, patience was a feat for the Doctor. She must have caught him trying to sneak a look as she barked “No peeking!” before he could crack open one eye.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she gave him permission to open his eyes. He did, and before him was a feast for his eyes, a very naked Rose wearing nothing more than a big red satin bow.

“Well, Doctor?” she asked saucily. “Aren’t you going to unwrap it?”

He grinned madly, taking in his favorite present so far. “Oh, yes.”


End file.
